A Strange House (2024)
Premise: Our dude is one of those really bad youtubers that basically reads spooooky stories or urban legends re-a-lly-slow-ly so they can monetize the video as hard as possible. One day, his uh, cameraman/manager/producer I guess? hands him the floorplan of a house he’s thinking about buying, but, he says, his wife is a bit creeped out by it. By the paper, not the house, yes, japanese people in horror movies are very weird.
Now, this is important, what I’m going to say next happens during the first five minutes so I promise I’m not spoiling anything: our hero shows the floorplan to his friend who is a very experienced and also really weird architect, they notice there’s this small gap between a couple of rooms with no door and of course immediately jump to the obvious conclusion from there…
THE HOUSE WAS BUILT TO MURDER PEOPLE.
Yeah, I mean. If you say so.
Under 90 minutes? Nah.
Do they say the title? Yes. Not just that: apparently the movie was also called “floorplan” in some markets and boy do they say that one a million times.
One sentence review: How many times can you keep saying a house was BUILT TO MURDER PEOPLE in a movie before it gets tiring, because I’m going to guess the answer is “one, maybe none”.
Rating: I can definitely say this didn’t go where I thought it would go (pejorative). Before watching I had just seen a couple of screenshots that showed our dudes and their plucky friend looking at the floorplans and I was like (read this with a very nerdy voice) “oh boy, I’m sure this is going to be one of those bonkers movies where the architecture makes no sense and it is unsettling but you don’t know why!”.
Well it, uhm, really is not about that and as the movie goes on the only thing you keep thinking is “wait, when did this movie change gears so hard”.
A simple way to improve it: Sometimes letting someone read your script before you start filming is a good idea because they might give you useful notes and advice like “what the fuck” and “who the hell cares about this other stuff here” and maybe specially “wait you’re going to introduce that storyline about fifteen minutes before the movie ends?”.
No IMDb trivia, so have an anecdote about today:
I started watching the movie and I very very quickly noticed the subtitles made no sense at all. Like, it was clearly a very very bad translation by someone with a lot of energy and enthusiasm that probably didn’t speak english OR japanese. Just so you know how smart I am, I kept noticing the characters would constantly talk about “windowsills” and I only needed like 15 minutes to realize they meant “floorplan”.
So since my japanese is only good enough to make a fool of myself, I needed to look for some other subtitles. In general they were more accurate, but like, at some point halfway through the movie I realized that:
- the subtitles would sometimes translate little expressions like “oh!” to “surprise!” or “weird feeling!” and such, which was dumb but endearing
- the characters would say one name, but the subtitles would say a completely different name
- worse: some characters would sometimes be called one name, but other times a different name (that matched what the actors were saying), and sometimes a THIRD name, which let me tell you didn’t help with some of the plot points
- which bring us to the now obvious conclusion: the subtitles were, clearly (…ahem), automatically translated from chinese and they were letting google translate take a wild guess about what each chinese hanzi meant, separately.
Watching movies can sometimes be an adventure! It is surprising I actually got what this movie was about, all things considered!
